For Honor First Impressions

After having played the beta, I wasn’t really into this game. It didn’t appear to have deep gameplay and it just sort of felt boring next to other games I had and wanted to play much more. My good friend had encouraged me to go ahead and get the game, explaining that there would be a campaign we could co-op and then jump into the multiplayer game modes. I still wasn’t totally sold on it but thought “why not, if I don’t like it, I can just take it back and get another game”. This was not the case.

I managed to get the game before my friend and had a chance to jump in and play the campaign for an hour or so before he was able to join me in our hopeful bashing of enemy helmets and laying waste to anyone that stood in our way. I soon found out that this game had much more to offer than I had anticipated. For Honor is incredible, even after the first hour of playing. They offer a really good tutorial in the start to make sure you know the basics of their intuitive and complex battle mechanics. But I will say, even after you manage to “think” you have a good handle on their systems and think you’re ready to take on the enemy AI, do not approach them lightly. They seem to have a few different enemy types that you can square up against and the AI design gets smarter the harder the enemies get. Some of the easier enemies you can take down in a few hits and they don’t seem to be too quick on the uptake to realize you’ve changed your stance and by the time they want to change, you’ve already hit them with your weapon and sent them staggering backward. Harder foes won’t be so easy. After having blown through knights left and right in the first chapter of the campaign, I found myself standing face to face with knight whose health bar had multiple segments to it, many more than the previous guys, who only had two or three. This knight had better looking armor, a fancy sword and looked like someone I would want my knight to look like one day. Facing this guy one on one seemed to be the battle of the century. With every swing of my sword, he seemed to know exactly what I was going to do, having a block prepared at the ready. I had remembered that I could break his blocks by charging him and then sending him backwards, falling off balance. That was my chance to strike! I swung my longsword with everything I had and dealt blow after blow until he managed to block my attack and start the process of blocking my attacks again. This time, however, I was prepared. I knew what I had to do to take this mightiest of foes down. This is what it’s like to play For Honor. No battle is the same, causing you to have to learn your opponents attack styles and adapt to changes they may make at a seconds notice.

“Executions are about as satisfying as Mortal Kombat’s fatalities”

After playing the campaign a bit more, I decided to try my hand at the multiplayer. I won’t lie, I was severely unprepared for the toils I would face while playing against human players. They were much stronger, smarter and were going to prove to be difficult and I could not let my guard down for even one second. I got put into a duel match, which is just a one on one battle with a human player and it’s a best of five. While my level online was only a one, I was synced up to battle a guy whose online level was a seven and his skill showed. I didn’t stand a chance. He knew the system better than I did and knew how to string together attacks and charges, knocking my character to the ground time and time again. Needless to say, I lost after only minutes.

I don’t want to come off saying this game is hard and deter someone away from giving it a try. It is challenging because there is a learning curve to the game but I feel once I get the hang of how to play and how to string together attacks properly, I too, will be a force to be reckoned with. I highly suggest this game because it is challenging and because it is truly a different game than anything we have on the market nowadays. The gameplay seems to be something I really want to take time mastering and testing out on friends as well as people I meet online. With that being said, I’m going to end this so I can get right back onto the battlefield. With my knight, I will win for my team, my brother in arms and For Honor.

David loves to play the guitar, though not always to other peoples favorite genres. He loves to play video games and has played them for longer than he cares to admit. His Favorite games to date include The Witcher 3, Rocket League, Titanfall 2, Bioshock, Halo and a new favorite, Horizon Zero Dawn. He has always wanted to do something in the gaming industry. Since he’s no programmer, writing about them and why he likes them will have to do. Feel free to follow him on Twitter for all things gaming and maybe a few things that aren’t.